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For three years, award-winning journalist Ben Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, living with Palestinian families in its largest cities and smallest villages. Placing readers in the footsteps of ordinary Palestinians, Ehrenreich’s new book, The Way to the Spring, offers some of the most empathetic reporting ever to emerge from the turbulent region. With a keen eye for detail, he paints a vivid portrait of life in three Palestinian villages, interspersed with crash-course history lessons on the Israel-Palestine conflict. In conversation with Amy Wilentz, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author and former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker, Ehrenreich discusses the journalist’s mission to listen and understand the complexities of human experience.
Ben Ehrenreich is the author of one book of journalism, The Way to the Spring; two novels, Ether and The Suitors; and many articles, stories, and essays. He lives in Los Angeles.
Amy Wilentz is the author of Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti, The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, Martyrs’ Crossing, and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger. She is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, and also was a 1990 nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2014, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Farewell, Fred Voodoo. She has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, Thompson-Reuters magazine, The New Republic, The Village Voice, and many other publications. She teaches in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California at Irvine, and lives in Los Angeles.
